A Little About Appleton, WI

Your Foresters are heading north to Appleton, WI tomorrow morning to take on the Vikings of Lawrence University. Both teams are 2-0 in Conference headed into tomorrow, so it should prove to be a good game. It is certainly one in which we hope to come away with a victory, but the Vikings have been a tough opponent for us I'm recent years.

Some facts about Appleton and Lawrence:

--Harry Houdini spent his childhood there after being born in Hungary.

--The actor Willem Dafoe (played the Green Goblin in Spiderman) was raised there and began his acting career at a local community theater.

--Lawrence is the second oldest co-ed college in the country, having admitted women a year after Oberlin College began doing so. Lawrence was chartered and founded in 1847, a year before Wisconsin became a state.

--Actor Campbell Scott, son of George C. Scott, is an LU alum; as is Terry Moran from ABC's Nightline; and Jeffrey Jones, who played the principal in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

--John Bradley, one of the men in the famous photo (and subsequent statue) of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima, grew up in Appleton and was a graduate of Appleton West High School. After the war he returned there and raised a family.

--Sen. Joseph McCarthy began his political career in Appleton and is buried in a local cemetary.

--If you find yourself in Appleton and notice a not-so-great odor it is, no doubt, the paper mills along the Fox River. Appleton is a center of the U.S. paper industry--Kimberly Clark and others are located nearby.

--The Hearthstone House, now a local museum, was the first residence in the world to be powered by an Edison hydroelectric station. Appleton also was the first community in the national to have an electrically powered street car, was home to the first telephone hook-up in Wisconsin, and the first incandescent light bulb outside the east coast.

--Lawrence University is named after its founder, Amos Lawrence, a Boston philanthropist and abolitionist. Lawrence, Kansas is named after his family as well.